Wednesday, June 18, 2008

"The dilemma of rational fictional emotions" (Gendler & Kovakovich, 2005)The strange subject position in games asks for problemization: "Enjoying the fear of being shot at"

Aims:- theorize and describe the conditions under which a computer game can be held responsible for its players emotions- to describe the ways in which features of the computer game medium can be used to elicit emotional experiences in the player

Phenomenology "Love is the desire to be with the beloved object" (Descartes). Every emotion is also a system of desire and intentions, hopes and wishes, or what I call de ideology of emotions" (Solomon).

Existence-independence: Emotions necessitates a conception about athe object, not the object itself.

Playing = Believing

Emotions transgress the boundaries of the game. The concept of the "magic circle" is not enough.

"The game plays the player" The players have a limited freedom and can only work within the boundaries of the game, but the gamer can also quit the game.

Inger Ekman: Emotional Effects of Sound in Computer Games

From a designer's viewpoint. "Unnecessary" sounds in new items, for instance added sounds in cameras or in the Mighty Mouse. Sounds as indicators of actions, gives feedback to the interaction.

Sounds are elusive, immaterial, momentary. Lack of static representation. Cumbersome analysis and (paper) publishing, esp. non-musical sounds. Difficult to determine the meaning of sound. Nevertheless, sound is now recognized as being of crucial importance to the game experience.

Synthesis: Identify design conventions, try to understand/explain why and how they workGoal: Design tools that allow producing new sound and predicting their effects

Emotions and SoundEmotional impact only part of our process of meaning-making. What is the meaning of sound? (What we hear depends on how we listen - listening modes. Context influences sound perception - multi-sensory interactions. Peroperties of the listener.) Emotion is seen as one form of meaning that can be extracted in the process of understaning and relating to sound.

Film sound — the most developed tradition of sound design. These ideas influence game sounds. Film sound conventions are easily "read" and understood by gamers.

Architecture theory to study online place.Body - embodiment, keeping you oriented in spaceMap - internal/external representations of the world, facilitating navigationLandscape - Building - Architectural, ethnographicalWorldview - How WoW is based on the idea of the "unlimited good." How the world is structured.What links it all is the word "orientation"

Lennart Nacke: A methodology for Psychophysiological Player Logging

Interdisciplinary game research. Broad perspective from a range of different disciplines. Deeply rooted in cultural studies. Early reflections, humanities approach, qualitative evaluations. The WoW phenomenon: Many researchers describing experiences while playing WoW. Few to no empirical studies.

Comparing qualitative and quantitative research. Argues that qualitative research is subjective on the part of the researcher, whereas quantitative research builds on both subjective and objective material/results. Easier to present the results to game designer as statistics.